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Qualcomm hopes Snapdragon smartbooks take bite out of Atom

Qualcomm has revealed that its 1Ghz Snapdragon ARM chip will ship in an …

Qualcomm's Snapdragon processor is finally coming to little laptops. The chip company has confirmed that its speedy ARM offering has been adopted by Lenovo for a new product with a netbook form-factor. The device will be available from AT&T, presumably offered with some kind of contract subsidy.

Despite being named after a flower, the Snapdragon has serious bite. Its Cortex-A8 core packs 1GHz of processing power, delivering an impressive balance of performance and energy efficiency. The chip is already being used in a handful of ultra high-end smartphones, including the HTC HD2 and Sony Ericsson's upcoming Xperia X10 Android handset. The company hopes to bring it to more mainstream phones and other devices in the future.

The Snapdragon-powered Lenovo system will be one of the first products in a new class of mobile devices that hardware makers are calling smartbooks—portable computers that look like netbooks but offer longer battery life thanks to low-energy ARM chips.

Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs demonstrated the Lenovo product at a recent press event. According to PCWorld's coverage of the briefing, the smartbook will be officially launched during CES in January. It is said to use a custom Linux platform and is capable of playing high definition video. Jacobs reportedly touted an instant-on experience and long battery life as key advantages of the device. AT&T has already lined up to partner with Lenovo as a distributor. The exact battery life of the Lenovo product is not known.

AT&T is extremely enthusiastic about opportunities for netbook subsidy deals. The mobile carrier says that its Acer Aspire One subsidy bundle was a tremendous success last year, compelling the company to pursue similar arrangements. The telecom has already partnered with Nokia to distribute the Finnish phone giant's Booklet 3G and expect it to be a hot seller during the holiday season.

Qualcomm has also revealed that it is working with component manufacturers, handset makers, and network operators on multi-mode chipset solutions that will make it possible to support 3G and LTE simultaneously in mobile devices. The company contends that bringing such technology to the market will be a big step towards the start of the industry's transition from 3G to 4G networks.

If you believe the hot rumors coming out of Taiwan, it's likely that the new Lenovo system will not be the only smartbook that launches this year. A number of other vendors, including Asus and Acer are said to be working on their own ARM-based smartbooks. NVIDIA's Tegra will compete with the Snapdragon in this space. Both will attempt to take a bite out of the small form-factor laptop market that is currently dominated by Intel's Atom chip.

49 Reader Comments

Why do I get the feeling that we're going to be calling these stupidbooks very soon? You can't take a hopped up cellphone processor and stick it into a tiny notebook chassis. The Atom is slow enough as it is, anything slower runs the real risk of being too slow. Not to mention the poor reception Linux netbooks seem to elicit.

These smartbooks had better be cheaper than the atom based netbooks. I've been waiting a long time for the originally promised $200 price tag that Asus was quoting in the run up to the release of the Eee. If they can get them down to $150, or half the cost of a netbook, it makes it almost an impulse buy.

Damn.. hot news about AMD and ARM in the same week... that's what I call getting my geek on. Please let it be $100 and capable of running Ubuntu. I can even imagine a Ubuntu desktop server running like this. The ultra waste of power is a big thing that keeps me out of doing that. If I could get a sub $100 solution for that that sucks less than 10 watts out of my wall, I would be all over it.

Actually the NT Kernel used to run on many different chip architectures, such as PowerPC and Digital Alpha. The userland may not be capable of running on ARM chips, but the kernel itself is capable of running on many different architectures. The current kernel runs on at least IA-64 (Itanium), x86, and x86-64.

It may not be worth porting all of Windows to ARM, but .Net should make it fairly easy to port many programs I would think.

Originally posted by flunk:Why do I get the feeling that we're going to be calling these stupidbooks very soon? You can't take a hopped up cellphone processor and stick it into a tiny notebook chassis. The Atom is slow enough as it is, anything slower runs the real risk of being too slow. Not to mention the poor reception Linux netbooks seem to elicit.

I disagree. These devices are basically used to browse the web, and web browsers have recently gotten - literally - faster by an order of magnitude. With any older browser (or any Internet Explorer at all), yeah, this would be painfully slow. But with e.g. the latest Chrome, speed should not be an issue.

Likewise about your Linux comment: As devices meant just to browse the web, it doesn't matter if Windows or Linux is powering the browser.

So it should be very interesting to see these devices when they come out. If the price is reasonable, of course.

Originally posted by wordsworm:@Ryan Paul - what do you think the chances are of this kind of thing being good enough for a home server?

Jon wrote an article in September about the possibility of building ARM-based servers. The bottom line is that the current A8 isn't quite there yet, but multicore processors built with the upcoming 2Ghz A9 might be able to handle certain kinds of server workloads. More details: http://is.gd/4TXAA

Originally posted by flunk:Why do I get the feeling that we're going to be calling these stupidbooks very soon? You can't take a hopped up cellphone processor and stick it into a tiny notebook chassis. The Atom is slow enough as it is, anything slower runs the real risk of being too slow. Not to mention the poor reception Linux netbooks seem to elicit.

Slow netbook performance can be attributed to the slow-ass hard drives they ship with. Put in a decent SSD and you have what feels like a supercomputer- or settle for a 7200RPM HD and you've got a surprisingly nimble machine.

So, Smartbooks are basically Netbooks running ARM CPUs? If ARM wins out over Intel that means Microsoft will be cut out of an entire market segment - not something that they'll take lying down. But I don't really see what options Microsoft has.

Converting Windows Mobile to run on smartbooks is obviously doable, but WinMo 6.5 is craptacular and 7.0 is quite a bit away and even that doesn't sound too exciting. And by going that route, you lose MS office, one of the main platform advatages Microsoft has.

Converting regular windows to run on ARM is a project that would take years. The kernel may be reasonably portable, but the sheer amount of code in Windows makes this a huge task. And for their platform advantage to really play out, they'd need to not only convert Windows, but also Office and a bunch of other applications. Huge undertaking.

My guess is that MS knows that most of their platform advantage is toast once we leave Intel land, and that they will do everything they can, including subsidizing Atom CPUS just to make x86 stay competitive.

Likewise about your Linux comment: As devices meant just to browse the web, it doesn't matter if Windows or Linux is powering the browser.

So it should be very interesting to see these devices when they come out. If the price is reasonable, of course.

It shouldn't matter what OS it runs. I know that. You know that. But not for the general public. ASUS had much more returns of their netbooks because of Linux.

thats a microsoft powered myth.

the only company seeing any real spike in returns was MSI, and their suse based system was missing basic drivers and similar. Its almost as if they wanted it to fail so that they could point to it and say that they tried.

also, if one look outside of USA, linux powered netbooks was recently found to have a 30% marketshare.

Originally posted by flunk:Why do I get the feeling that we're going to be calling these stupidbooks very soon? You can't take a hopped up cellphone processor and stick it into a tiny notebook chassis. The Atom is slow enough as it is, anything slower runs the real risk of being too slow. Not to mention the poor reception Linux netbooks seem to elicit.

that depends on what your trying to do with the thing.

Sure its not up do doing RAW edits or HD video, but if thats what your after, your hoping for to much.

Originally posted by Doink:These smartbooks had better be cheaper than the atom based netbooks. I've been waiting a long time for the originally promised $200 price tag that Asus was quoting in the run up to the release of the Eee. If they can get them down to $150, or half the cost of a netbook, it makes it almost an impulse buy.

Why are you advocating a race to the bottom

In a current ~$300 Netbook, you can have 10 hour battery life, a nice chassis, a nice screen, semi-reasonable performance, light weight, etc.

You would lose all of those features if the price were halved - the value of a slow-ass plastic pile of dung, with almost no memory, the world's slowest Hard Drive, and some sort of screen using 5-year-old LCD technology wouldn't be worth $150 of anyone's money. Cheaper isn't better !

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Originally posted by axell:If ARM wins out over Intel that means Microsoft will be cut out of an entire market segment...

"wins out" ? The ARM Netbooks are dead in the water without Microsoft support - the "market segment" that is Netbooks only exists because the majority run Windows !If they were only available running <some other OS> then they'd be a tiny niche.

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Originally posted by axell:My guess is that MS knows that most of their platform advantage is toast once we leave Intel land

But we aren't leaving Intel land ? What are you talking about ?Intel land and the MS platform are one and the same - neither is going anywhere.

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Originally posted by hobgoblin:also, if one look outside of USA, linux powered netbooks was recently found to have a 30% marketshare.

That's comeplete nonsense - here outside of the USA, most Netbooks aren't even available without Windows any more ! The Linux-models were a short fad, and have mostly died out.

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Originally posted by hobgoblin:

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Originally posted by flunk:Why do I get the feeling that we're going to be calling these stupidbooks very soon? The Atom is slow enough as it is, anything slower runs the real risk of being too slow.

that depends on what your trying to do with the thing.

Not really - even the most basic tasks like displaying a Flash-heavy webpage, or playing a decent resolution video, are absolutely abysmal on an Atom system.flunk is quite right - the Atom is already slow enough. Anything slower is surely a none-starter - I've done everything possible to eek more performance from my EEE 901, and it's only just about adequate for the most basic tasks.

Yes, while it's great that an ARM board this cheap has been around since last summer, it's still lacking onboard ethernet and more RAM or a SO-DIMM slot. Yes, I realize you can add ethernet via USB, and the low power DDR onboard helps with power usage. What's the reason why they couldn't use DDR3 and at least provide a bit more RAM?

However, that's basically the reason why I wouldn't buy any current ARM based netbook, the lack of a reasonable amount of RAM or an inability to add more. They are already reasonably slow, and having to use swap would degrade my user experience even more, or even be unreasonable to use swap due to the use of an SSD. Yes, I realize they are supposed to be netbooks/smartbooks, and that you aren't supposed to expect a "power user" user experience from them. However, with multiple core ARMs on the horizon, I would expect the issue of CPU performance to decrease, and without an increase in the amount of RAM, the "power user" user experience isn't going to improve.

As long as these ARMbooks "smartbooks" are sold as web devices the public should be OK with them. If they are sold as small laptops the public will be unhappy they can't load MS Office, games, etc on them. Debian can run on ARM and there is a version of Ubuntu either released or about to be released for ARM. Microsoft is pushing Windows CE for these devices, but it doesn't have a decent browser (a bit of a problem for a machine that mostly does web browsing). If the hardware/software integration is good and the price is low they should do well. These will in no way be targeted as a customer's only/main computer. Why would anyone need HD video on a machine with a 7-9" screen?

Likewise about your Linux comment: As devices meant just to browse the web, it doesn't matter if Windows or Linux is powering the browser.

So it should be very interesting to see these devices when they come out. If the price is reasonable, of course.

It shouldn't matter what OS it runs. I know that. You know that. But not for the general public. ASUS had much more returns of their netbooks because of Linux.

Well, that was one datapoint from a particular manufacturer, and it was more relevant to a much earlier stage in the whole 'netbook' market. That market has adapted meanwhile. When marketed correctly as what they are - devices for browsing the web, and that's it - the OS isn't an issue. And that is where the smartbook market is going.

Regarding what other people are saying about Windows - Windows isn't relevant for this space, for 2 reasons. First, while Microsoft can port the OS, they can't port all the 3rd party apps that are Windows-specific, and those apps are the only reason to want Windows here (because other OSes can browse the web just as well, or better). Second, those apps aren't relevant here anyhow - the point of these devices is just to browse the web. So we won't be seeing Windows on these devices (but Windows will continue to do well on desktops, normal laptops, etc.).

I can imagine something like this running Xubuntu, or some future version of Haiku that has an ARM port. The only thing keeping it from a comfortable web browsing machine is the bizarrely inefficient Adobe flash plugin.

Originally posted by Nom:That's comeplete nonsense - here outside of the USA, most Netbooks aren't even available without Windows any more ! The Linux-models were a short fad, and have mostly died out.

Funny how Linux makes up some 30% of the worldwide netbook market today if "Linux-models were a short fad".

No - the real story here is that Microsoft suddenly woke up and strong-arm'ed (pun intended) as many manufacturers and bricks-and-mortar retailers as it could to limit the spread of cheap netbooks running Linux. While that activity wiped out Linux-on-Netbooks in the stores, it hasn't halted the market. The netbook was just a single step in the current diversification of the market towards web-centric devices, and this revolution was really started by the iPhone and other smart phone competitors. This revolution is the one that Microsoft really fears can take a large bite out of its sales.

We're seeing devices to fill the gap between laptop and smart phone, often specifically for browsing, reading and interacting with online services. The Crunchpad, Kindle DX, Nook are all part of this movement and these devices are not tied to the Intel platform. Linux is often the OS of choice here, particularly on commodity devices that are being built with commodity margins.

I predict that by the end of 2010, we will have seen a significant number of sub-$200 Linux/ARM devices in smartbook or similar formats. I also predict that we'll see battery life going up above 15 hours for six cell or less batteries. The only question right now is how the current shakeup between Google Android, Moblin, Maemo and other customized Linux distributions works out in the marketplace.

I just got done struggling with Lenovo to get a replacement part for a comp of theirs. It was a very torturous, painful experience that wasted a ton of my time. I don't care how great their tech is, if their support sucks then I'm going to avoid them like the plague in the future.

Yes, while it's great that an ARM board this cheap has been around since last summer, it's still lacking onboard ethernet and more RAM or a SO-DIMM slot. Yes, I realize you can add ethernet via USB, and the low power DDR onboard helps with power usage. What's the reason why they couldn't use DDR3 and at least provide a bit more RAM?

However, that's basically the reason why I wouldn't buy any current ARM based netbook, the lack of a reasonable amount of RAM or an inability to add more. They are already reasonably slow, and having to use swap would degrade my user experience even more, or even be unreasonable to use swap due to the use of an SSD. Yes, I realize they are supposed to be netbooks/smartbooks, and that you aren't supposed to expect a "power user" user experience from them. However, with multiple core ARMs on the horizon, I would expect the issue of CPU performance to decrease, and without an increase in the amount of RAM, the "power user" user experience isn't going to improve.

Here's the Efika MX Open Client. It is the ARM analog of the Atom Nettops and has a bit more power, memory, and connectivity for $249 and it runs Ubuntu Linux. The company is also supposed to be coming out with the Efika MX Smartbook in the near future. It would be interesting to see an Ars review of something like the Open Client to see what the current state of Linux on ARM is.

Originally posted by kripkenstein:Well, that was one datapoint from a particular manufacturer, and it was more relevant to a much earlier stage in the whole 'netbook' market. That market has adapted meanwhile. When marketed correctly as what they are - devices for browsing the web, and that's it - the OS isn't an issue. And that is where the smartbook market is going.

If it looks like a notebook, people will treat it like a notebook. It doesn't really matter how it's marketed.

Intel says they see this market as so big, that they will only leave about 2% of their business in servers and desktops. Let's hope they can do well in this marketplace without paying competitors supply chains to stop selling those parts.

What's funny is that as these chips mature and increase in computational power, they will be able to power PC's and possibly servers.

Maybe these little systems are a new way to break the Intel/Windows monopolies.

Originally posted by jhu:If it looks like a notebook, people will treat it like a notebook. It doesn't really matter how it's marketed.

OK, I'll bite and join the pointless flamewar: See thedata. Care to provide any to support your claims?

(disclaimer: even as a Linux fan, I find the overtaking statement overly optimistic. Maybe Netapp's data is unreliable - no surprises there - but after selling 10M Linux boxes - that are intended to browse the web, no less - the share definitely should have gone up a little. If it's true that all those Asian buyers are putting pirated windows on them, the smartbooks will be huge flop - we'll see)

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Originally posted by kripkenstein:Likewise about your Linux comment: As devices meant just to browse the web, it doesn't matter if Windows or Linux is powering the browser.

An ARM-based netbook sounds like the kind of hardware Google is aiming for with their Chrome OS, but I've heard of demo units running Android. Ubuntu is also beefing up their support for ARM systems, and because they use a lot of Debian packages there should be a wealth of software available for an Ubuntu-running "smartbook." There are already specialist versions of Linux targeting ARM, like Angstrom, that can be fitted with a reduced, appliance-like interface or a full desktop environment. It seems the Pandora team is going with Angstrom + XFCE, with the e17 desktop as a fall-back. On the other hand, the only version of Windows that will run on ARM is Windows Mobile, which generally isn't compatible with desktop windows software anyway. And in case you were thinking about emulating Windows through Linux + WINE or QEMU, it doesn't look feasible, at least for the current generation of ARM designs. xkcd makes a good point, hopefully the Adobe can get their shit together on that one. I'm waiting to see what people say about Flash on the Nokia N900, which should be a good indicator of performance on smartbooks.

Originally posted by axell:I don't really see what options Microsoft has.

I agree.

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Windows Mobile ... 7.0 is quite a bit away and even that doesn't sound too exciting.

WinMo 7 is targetted to arrive in 2010 - I imagine that we'll all have a MUCH better picture of what it'll be one year from now.

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Converting regular windows to run on ARM is a project that would take years. The kernel may be reasonably portable, but the sheer amount of code in Windows makes this a huge task. And for their platform advantage to really play out, they'd need to not only convert Windows, but also Office and a bunch of other applications. Huge undertaking.

What makes you think they're not already working on this. They've already ported Windows to run on ARM once before, but decided not to pursue it at the time because ARM CPU's were just too underpowered at the time.

Today, however, what with ARM CPU's computationally competing with Intel at the lower end and having a great deal of room above for perf improvements in the future, I'd assume that ARM is here to stay and will become increasingly important moving forward.

Who knows what'll happen in the next couple of years, but considering that most of MS' codebase is CPU agnostic, recompiling Office for ARM would not take rocket science. After all, MS has been compiling Office for Mac to PPC for some time now.

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My guess is that MS knows that most of their platform advantage is toast once we leave Intel land, and that they will do everything they can, including subsidizing Atom CPUS just to make x86 stay competitive.

So long as MS provides a decent recompilation story for ARM, most ISV's will readily port ro ARM, and most likely with few issues since few ISV's apps are CPU-dependent.

Originally posted by Wheels Of Confusion:An ARM-based netbook sounds like the kind of hardware Google is aiming for with their Chrome OS, but I've heard of demo units running Android.

You DO know the difference between a CPU architecture and a Linux OS distro', right?

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Ubuntu is also beefing up their support for ARM systems, and because they use a lot of Debian packages there should be a wealth of software available for an Ubuntu-running "smartbook."

All platforms have a similar issue in that any code that is CPU-architecture dependent will require changes and all code will require recompilation in order to run on a new CPU architecture. While many OSS products ship with source, many have issues when being ported to new CPU's.

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There are already specialist versions of Linux targeting ARM, like Angstrom, that can be fitted with a reduced, appliance-like interface or a full desktop environment. It seems the Pandora team is going with Angstrom + XFCE, with the e17 desktop as a fall-back. On the other hand, the only version of Windows that will run on ARM is Windows Mobile, which generally isn't compatible with desktop windows software anyway.

That's the story today. MS has already ported Windows to ARM once before. What's to stop them doing it again? If the market is there, MS will port.

Originally posted by Nom:That's comeplete nonsense - here outside of the USA, most Netbooks aren't even available without Windows any more ! The Linux-models were a short fad, and have mostly died out.

Funny how Linux makes up some 30% of the worldwide netbook market today if "Linux-models were a short fad".

No - the real story here is that Microsoft suddenly woke up and strong-arm'ed (pun intended) as many manufacturers and bricks-and-mortar retailers as it could to limit the spread of cheap netbooks running Linux. While that activity wiped out Linux-on-Netbooks in the stores, it hasn't halted the market. The netbook was just a single step in the current diversification of the market towards web-centric devices, and this revolution was really started by the iPhone and other smart phone competitors. This revolution is the one that Microsoft really fears can take a large bite out of its sales.

We're seeing devices to fill the gap between laptop and smart phone, often specifically for browsing, reading and interacting with online services. The Crunchpad, Kindle DX, Nook are all part of this movement and these devices are not tied to the Intel platform. Linux is often the OS of choice here, particularly on commodity devices that are being built with commodity margins.

I predict that by the end of 2010, we will have seen a significant number of sub-$200 Linux/ARM devices in smartbook or similar formats. I also predict that we'll see battery life going up above 15 hours for six cell or less batteries. The only question right now is how the current shakeup between Google Android, Moblin, Maemo and other customized Linux distributions works out in the marketplace.

No ... although you may not like it, the real story is that MS saw the market for netbooks start to warm up and dug out an 8 year old OS that is nearing end of life and offered it to OEM's for a small fee ($15 each copy). OEM's shipped Linux and XP models to retailers. Retailers offered BOTH to their customers. Customers overwhelmingly bought XP based netbooks ... in some cases, paying $20 more for the privelige.

Many retailers even returned unsold linux netbooks to their OEM's in order for the OEM to re-format the HDD's and install XP instead because they could do this quicker than manufacture new XP netbooks.

In less than one year, linux netbooks accounted for < 5% Of netbook sales.

The TRUTH is that customers want to run Windows because they know how to use it and it runs all their favorite apps ... albeit a little slower on a netbook.

If the market is there and ARM based netbooks start to become a real market opportunity, MS will port Windows and Office to ARM. It's not as if they don't know how to!

Originally posted by flunk:Why do I get the feeling that we're going to be calling these stupidbooks very soon? You can't take a hopped up cellphone processor and stick it into a tiny notebook chassis. The Atom is slow enough as it is, anything slower runs the real risk of being too slow. Not to mention the poor reception Linux netbooks seem to elicit.

that depends on what your trying to do with the thing.

Sure its not up do doing RAW edits or HD video, but if thats what your after, your hoping for to much.

If the beagle board can run HD video while running at 500Mhz with a custom build of mplayer with neon optimisations(arm vector instructions similar to SSE etc) at 1GHz these should have no problems.

Originally posted by Wheels Of Confusion:An ARM-based netbook sounds like the kind of hardware Google is aiming for with their Chrome OS, but I've heard of demo units running Android.

You DO know the difference between a CPU architecture and a Linux OS distro', right?

No, I think Pentium is a spin of Fedora. :PGoogle is making official versions of Chrome OS targeted for either x86 or ARM without the third-party hacking necessary to port Android onto x86-based netbooks. This means they should have an OS that is pretty much ready-to-go on Snapdragon-based smartbooks or Atom-based netbooks. Google has always said Android was a phone OS (however open and hackable it is) and getting it to work on anything other than ARM has taken a little elbow grease, while Chrome OS seems to be for devices with larger screens whether they use Intel or ARM. Hence, Snapdragon smartbooks -> hardware Google intends Chrome OS to run on.

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All platforms have a similar issue in that any code that is CPU-architecture dependent will require changes and all code will require recompilation in order to run on a new CPU architecture. While many OSS products ship with source, many have issues when being ported to new CPU's.

The thing is that Debian policy encourages packages to be compiled for the different architectures Debian supports, whether it's x86/64, ARM, or even MIPS. As it is, Debian has some 16K packages that will run on ARM.

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That's the story today. MS has already ported Windows to ARM once before. What's to stop them doing it again? If the market is there, MS will port.

MS can port Windows all they want (I don't think it's likely unless ARM-book numbers start catching up to Atom-book numbers), but most of the software people buy and use for Windows is compiled for x86. So the "Windows runs all their favorite apps!" argument is severely reduced. Whether that hurts Linux on ARM-books or just ARM-books in general is up in the air right now.

The Snapdragons from Qualcomm that were featured at Computex (asian electronics conference) had dedicated video decoders for doing HD. So the amount of processor power is largely moot.

According to Dell, one third of its Mini 9's ship with Linux and Linux returns are no higher than Windows returns. This is according to quotes from Laptopmag and Dell execs at OpenSource World. Thats something that would have been unheard of just a couple years ago.

Actually, they did design the entire core themselves. Qualcomm bought an ARM architecture license. Snapdragon's CPU uses qualcomm's very own microarchitecture, through and through. It implements the same armv7 instruction set as the Cortex series, but it isn't a cortex.